Honourable members, thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today.
Right now as I speak to you, a young girl of perhaps no more than 10 or 11, poor, most likely living in a remote rural area, is being forced to leave the only home she has ever known. She's frightened, confused, and above all powerless to stop the transaction taking place: her marriage to a much older man, a complete stranger. Today is the day that her childhood ends and along with it her education, her aspirations, and any chance of reaching her full potential. It is a brutal violation of her human rights.
This cruel scenario plays out again and again. Every two seconds a girl under the age of 18 is married, most often without free, prior, or informed consent. If current trends continue, an additional 142 million girls will be married before their 18th birthday by the year 2020. About 16 million girls aged 15 to 19 give birth each year, and complications from pregnancy and childbirth are the second leading cause of death among girls in that age group. Many of those pregnancies result from non-consensual sex, and nine out of ten of those take place within early marriages.
In many countries, adolescence is a time when life opens up for boys but closes down for girls. The vital transitions on the path to adulthood are often diverted or interrupted by harmful practices such as child, early, or forced marriage and female genital mutilation; by sexual violence; by adolescent pregnancy; and by lack of access to sexual and reproductive health services. The consequences in loss of health, empowerment, education, and opportunities for work are profound. Communities and societies feel the impact too. Most development goals related to gender, health, and education will not be achieved without addressing these issues.
Millions of adolescent girls and young women live in deep poverty. They may be working in domestic service or under unsafe occupations or be engaged in exploitative sex work. They may be migrants or affected by conflict or disaster, situations in which young women and girls are often at the highest risk of poor sexual and reproductive health, violence, and exploitation.
It is unacceptable that these human rights violations continue to threaten the lives and futures of so many women and girls. UNFPA is unequivocally committed to promoting and protecting human rights, including the rights of young people and especially the rights of adolescent girls. We believe that when they can claim their right to health, including access to sexual and reproductive health, to education, and to decent work, they become powerful agents of social and economic development.
That is why we have scaled up our program focus on adolescent girls, supporting national governments and local partners with targeted investments aimed at reaching the most marginalized adolescent girls at the highest risk of the most severe human rights violations. We do these by focusing on interventions that delay marriage and pregnancy and that enhance girls' autonomy, their access to social networks, and their participation in civil life; by reducing school dropouts; by creating an enabling environment that upholds the girls' rights; and by ensuring that they have access to sexual and reproductive health and rights and HIV knowledge and practices; and also by increasing the demand for high-quality, rights-based family planning.
We thank the Government of Canada for your active engagement in working to make these harmful practices history. Canada is a close and strategic partner of UNFPA, and empowering adolescent girls and ending child marriage is part and parcel of the world we all want. We rely on Canada and other partners to proactively engage in high-level advocacy to raise the profile of these issues in political processes, such as the post-2015 negotiations. As we have seen around the world, parliamentarians can play a powerful role in eliminating child, early, and forced marriage through their support for legal reform.
Honourable members, over a quarter of the world's population, 1.8 billion people, are between the ages of 10 and 24. It's the largest generation of young people the world has ever seen. Within this cohort of young people are 600 million adolescent girls.
We cannot talk about sustainable development without ensuring that the needs of young people are met, and this requires investment and commitments. We have abundant evidence to show that investing in young people, and particularly in adolescent girls, presents an enormous opportunity that can really be a game changer in addressing some of the biggest challenges we face, including extreme poverty and discrimination, and for charting a more sustainable pathway to development.
If we can ensure, for example, that the young girl I spoke of earlier stays in school, is protected from violence, protected from early marriage and other harmful practices, has access to information, and the means to protect herself from motherhood in childhood, then she is equipped with choices and is able to fulfill her potential. She and millions like her, along with her brothers, will become powerful agents for social change and will shape a better future for us all.
Thank you very much.